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Dec. 9, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:14
California, Land Of Evil | Ep. 1392
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California unveils a plan to become an abortion sanctuary if Roe vs. Wade is overturned, and David Brooks rips the state of modern conservatism.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so...
I escaped California in 2020.
And frankly, I feel like I was a couple of years too late.
I'd been discussing with my wife the possibility of leaving California for a while.
I'd been discussing with my business partner, Jeremy Boring, the possibility of taking our company and moving it out of state for quite a while.
But finally, we pulled the trigger in 2020.
And not a moment too soon, as it turns out, because California has now reduced itself to a smoldering ash heap, apparently.
It is amazing.
How governance makes a difference.
It really does.
Because California has been blessed with some of the greatest assets that God has ever bestowed upon mankind.
It's got beautiful natural scenery.
It's got unbelievable natural resources.
It has high levels of intellectual capital.
It's a huge bustling population.
And yet, somehow, they are turning California into a dystopian hellscape.
It truly is an unbelievable thing.
And the vision for California has changed.
And if California is sort of the harbinger of the future from the left, then it behooves us to take a look at what California has become.
The California dream used to be that you would come out to California, you get a job, maybe working at JPL or maybe working in Hollywood, and then you'd be able to afford a house in Burbank or a house in San Fernando Valley amidst the orange groves.
With a white picket fence and two and a half kids, and you'd be able to create a life for yourself.
This was the promise of California.
And if you look back at the old tourism videos from the 1950s in California, this was the pitch.
Everything was clean and new.
Now, obviously, this is not to pretend that there were no problems in California or in the country in 1953, the most obvious being segregation.
Although in California, segregation was lower than it was in most other places in the country.
L.A.
was one of the least segregated cities in America in the 1950s.
To pretend that racism wasn't a massive problem in the 1950s is, of course, silly.
But that's not the point.
The point is that the vision that was being presented for what life would be like in a thriving California was pretty simple.
It was law-abiding.
You had shows on TV in the 50s and 60s about the greatness of the LAPD.
You had a generalized feeling of opportunity, that this was a great place to raise a family.
Here's a tourism video from 1953, sort of bragging about what's best in California.
In the year since the turn of the century, Los Angeles has grown from a sleepy Pueblo to a vast, seething metropolitan city.
Fine buildings, huge stores, busy citizens.
This is Hollywood Boulevard and the world-renowned Grauman's Chinese Theater.
In the forecourt of this celebrated cinema house are the footprints of the outstanding stars of the screen.
It is almost unnecessary to say that among the chief attractions of the Southern California picture is its many miles of beaches where you can be as athletic as you choose or just loll around and build up a beautiful tan.
Okay, so if you went back to California right now, and you went to each one of those sites, they're hellholes.
They really are.
I mean, that video opens driving through downtown Los Angeles.
You can see City Hall in that particular video.
And City Hall is now slum row.
It is a homeless encampment.
And then they show Grauman's Chinese, right on Hollywood Boulevard.
They're close to Sunset and Vine over there.
That's kind of the center of Hollywood.
That place has been taken over by the homeless.
A couple of years ago, there was a person who literally had a bucket of feces thrown on her at the intersection that they show in that video.
And then they show Santa Monica Beach, which used to be clean and nice.
Santa Monica Beach is so bad that the weekend before my family left California, we were getting kind of nostalgic because my wife and I had gone on our first date at the coffee bean near Santa Monica Beach.
And then we had gone for a walk along the beach.
And even then it wasn't so bad.
This is 2008.
2007, late 2007.
And we went back there as sort of a nostalgia play.
We brought our kids to a park on Santa Monica Beach where a homeless man was trying to expose himself to people.
Another homeless man was spitting at patrons of a restaurant and open needles were visible everywhere.
They have wrecked California.
They've completely wrecked it.
And they seem to be morally invested in wrecking California.
They seem to feel good about wrecking California.
It's as though they've decided that all of the benefits of living in California have to go away, and the way that they're going to make up for the complete failure of their system of thought is by proclaiming their own moral superiority.
So the latest round of this sort of insanity comes courtesy of the Associated Press.
It's an amazing, amazing story.
It really says all that you need to know about what California is and where California is going.
Apparently California is seeking to become now what they call an abortion sanctuary.
I'll get to this in just one moment because I mean that's just evil.
I'm sorry.
So you have decided that your state's tourism industry is now going to be based on women coming to kill their babies within your borders.
So, my new state of Florida, we're paying police officers like 10 grand bonuses to come and help protect the population.
California, they're literally now saying that they will pay the hotel bills for women who wish to decamp to California to kill their unborn children.
A pretty stark contrast.
We'll get to this story in just one moment, because it really does, if this is the future of the country, we are so screwed, we are screwed beyond all comprehension.
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Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and Alright, so according to the Associated Press, California is seeking to become what they now call an abortion sanctuary.
So first of all, I just want to point out the linguistic insanity of that phrase.
The word sanctuary comes from the same root as the word sanctified.
A sanctuary is a place that is sanctified.
That is what a sanctuary is.
And in the before times, when there were ecclesiastical courts throughout Europe, you were able to rush to a church, if you wish to avoid criminal culpability, people would rush to churches for sanctuary, right?
They would claim sanctuary.
This is obviously a major plot point in, for example, in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Is people rushing into, is Esmeralda rushing into the Cathedral of Notre Dame and claiming sanctuary?
I think that she wishes to be subject to ecclesiastical law as opposed to the king's law.
Sanctuary was a way of claiming God's providence over you and not the state's providence.
Now you have the state of California declaring sanctuary for either illegal activity in the form of illegal immigration or for the worst sin in American life, abortion.
It's now going to be a sanctuary, a sanctified place, protected from all others for abortion.
You're not rushing to avoid culpability for an act for which you believe you are innocent.
You instead are rushing to a sanctified place where your abortion can be protected.
The language is so paganistic as to shock the conscience.
According to the Associated Press, with more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the United States Supreme Court gives them okay next year, California clinics and their allies in the state legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a sanctuary for those seeking reproductive care.
It's a euphemism.
Including possibly paying for travel, lodging, and procedures for people from other states.
So they're not just saying we're going to keep abortion legal in California, which is exactly what you would expect, of course.
They're literally saying that they will take the taxpayer dollars of the people who pay taxes in California to pay women to come to the states to kill their unborn children.
So remember, the California dream was, come here, raise a family, buy a house, get a job, lead a law-abiding life, and contribute to the building of the world's greatest economy.
And now the California Dream is, move to California, get a crappy one-bedroom studio apartment, have a homeless guy sitting directly outside your door, shooting heroin into his feet, and if you need an abortion, we'll pay your hotel and maybe medical bills.
The California Dream is, come on over here, we'll put you up at the Hilton, and we'll carve that baby right out of you.
That is a rather astonishing change and bespeaks a suicidal society.
Any society that is actively incentivizing abortion is a suicidal society.
There's no other way to put it.
You're literally destroying your fertility rates.
You're destroying your future on a literal level.
If kids are the future, as the left constantly agrees, right?
We all agree kids are the future because there literally is no future without kids.
Then actively fomenting the killing of unborn children Seems to be anti-future.
But California isn't about building a future anymore.
California is about a vision of a utopian society in which full stasis has been reached.
If you found a company in California right now, you're an idiot.
I've talked to some of the biggest industrial founders in California.
I've talked to some of the biggest tech people in California.
People like with, I promise you, the biggest tech companies in California.
And they've told me personally, if they were founding their companies today, there is no way in hell they would put those companies in California.
There's a reason that Elon Musk just moved Tesla's headquarters out of California.
There's a reason for this.
This is a dying state and they are choosing the death.
This is a suicidal state in terms of policy.
And a morally benighted state at that.
The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, according to the AP, released a list of 45 recommendations for the state to consider if the high court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion.
The recommendations are not just a liberal fantasy.
Some of the state's most important policymakers helped write them, including Tony Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who leads the state Senate and attended multiple meetings.
Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom started the group himself and in an interview last week with the AP said some of the report's details will be included in his budget proposal in January.
We will be a sanctuary, Newsom said, adding he's aware patients will likely travel to California from other states to seek abortions.
We're looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.
California already pays for abortions for many low-income residents through the state's Medicaid program.
And California is one of six states that require private insurance companies to cover abortions, although many patients still end up paying deductibles and copayments.
But money won't be a problem for state-funded abortion services for patients from other states.
California's coffers have soared throughout the pandemic, fueling a record budget surplus this year.
You know why the California coffers soared?
Because the federal government pumped so much money into the economy that California actually increased its tax take.
For all the jabbering about how states were gonna go bankrupt because of COVID, states made money during COVID because the federal government pumped an unprecedented amount of money into the economy, and then California just taxed it.
They actually had a state surplus last year.
Next year, the state's independent legislative office predicts California will have a surplus of about $31 billion.
Of course, none of that takes into account the structural debt that the state of California has, which probably run into the hundreds of billions or trillions at this point.
California's abortion providers are asking the state to make it easier for people to get to the state.
The report recommends funding, including public spending, to support patients seeking abortion for travel expenses like gas, lodging, transportation, and childcare.
So some states try to incentivize you to come to their state by giving you a job or giving you a child tax credit or something.
The state of California is encouraging people to come to the state of abortion, to the state of abortion, come to the state of California and be paid to perform abortions.
Full-scale moral insanity.
They're asking lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who can't afford to pay.
A huge influx of people from other states will definitely destabilize the abortion provider network, said Fabiola Carreon, the Interim Director for Reproductive and Sexual Health at the National Health Law Program.
She said out-of-state abortions would also likely be later-term procedures, which are more complicated and more expensive.
The report asks lawmakers to help clinics increase their workforce to prepare for more patients by giving scholarships to medical students who pledge to offer abortion services in rural areas, help them pay off their student loans, and assist with their monthly liability insurance premiums.
So now we are going to pay up-and-coming medical students to violate Hippocratic Oath.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
And again, speaks to the morality of California, where it is all about a feeling of consonance with left-wing morality, and not at all about the quality of life or future of the state.
Which is why, if you are in California, and you do not agree with this stuff, get the hell out now.
Run.
I've been telling people this since we left.
I stuck around for as long as I thought it was possible to stay around.
I do not understand why people are sticking around in California if they have a shred of sanity about them at this point.
This is not getting better, it is getting worse.
There is no point in California where they are going to turn around and realize that they've completely botched this thing beyond all recognition.
They're not going to do it.
There are too many Democrats in the state.
California is the most populous Republican state.
They're the most Republicans in California of any state because the population of California is upwards of 40 million.
If you are a red state person in the blue state of California, get out while the getting is good.
Move to a purple state.
Move to a red state.
It'll improve your life radically.
And you won't be complicit in the taxpayer funding of the death of the unborn.
The fact that this has become the California dream, it's a California nightmare.
Unreal.
And by the way, the California nightmare is on every scale.
It's on every scale.
It makes elites feel really good about themselves because they can say, oh, I paid for this poor woman's abortion.
I paid for her abortion.
That homeless guy, he gets to live on the street because of me.
Man, we even have needle exchanges.
Look how much sympathy we have for people.
We're not prosecuting criminals.
We want those criminals to be out on the street.
Should somebody's life be ruined just because they engage in a smash and grab every so often?
Well, I'm glad that they feel good about themselves because they can afford to wall themselves off in their own little Elysium.
But that ain't the real world.
And California is becoming a hellscape for the vast majority of its citizens at this point.
We'll get to more on California in just one second because as goes California, so goes the entire left.
If you think this is going to stop at California, you're wrong.
It starts in California and then it moves throughout all of the blue states.
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Alrighty, so obviously it's not just abortion.
That is a California issue.
It is just the most obvious moral abomination in which California wishes to be complicit.
They're literally acting as a magnet for the killing of the unborn.
That's an unreal thing.
It is one thing to say that California wishes to retain legal abortion.
You would expect nothing less.
It's California.
But for California to say that they actively want to pay people to come to California to have abortions is... It's nuts.
It's just nuts.
Hey, meanwhile, criminality in California continues to be a massive issue.
Smash and grabs, organized smash and grabs, are a thing.
There's an 81-year-old woman who was recently shot inside her own home and robbed.
There's a man who was recently shot on the street in California for his watch.
He was in his car, somebody walked up, shot him, took his watch.
And the reason for this is pretty obvious.
It's because California has decided that criminality will no longer count as crime.
They've defined crime down.
There's a famous phrase from former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
It was defining deviancy down.
His suggestion is that as a society, when you say something is no longer deviant, it becomes more common.
Which makes sense.
When you subsidize things, they become more common.
And when you find crime down, crime becomes more common.
So if you take a felony and you treat it as a misdemeanor, you will get more of that behavior.
And if you take a misdemeanor and you treat it as a non-crime, you'll get more of that behavior.
This is exactly what you're hearing from the Beverly Hills police chief who said yesterday that the big problem here is that we are catching the same criminals over and over and over again and then just releasing them back onto the streets.
I have great technical systems here to catch criminals.
And that's the thing, we're catching the criminals, and the problem is we're catching them over and over again, and they're being released very quickly without bail, and they're not staying in prison.
So we just continue to deal with the same people again and again.
That's Mark Stainbrook.
He is the Beverly Hills police chief.
He said this is a confluence of about 10 years of laws and policymaking, starting with Prop 47, then AB 109, then Prop 57, which essentially decriminalized many of the crimes in California.
And it makes people in California feel good about themselves that they are doing this.
I mean, sure, it's completely destroying quality of life.
Sure, it's making street crime a thing again in California, but it makes the liberal elites feel so good about themselves.
Meanwhile, a Safeway store in San Francisco, according to Daily Wire, is now investing heavily into security systems to prevent smash and grab robberies.
The move comes as major metro areas, especially San Francisco and other California cities, combat a wave of group thefts in which large crowds of armed people rob stores and overwhelm employees.
According to KPIX 5 San Francisco, customers say they've noticed more security guards inside and outside the store.
Now they're seeing more security gates and barriers at the entrance.
An automatic gate closes after each person to make it harder for thieves to make a run for it.
Safeway added poles to its shopping carts to make them difficult to remove from the store.
It closed off a side exit.
It added a wall of water bottles directing customers to the front exit.
According to a statement from Safeway, like other local businesses, we are working on ways to curtail escalating theft, to ensure the well-being of our customers, and to foster a welcoming environment for our customers.
Their safety remains top priority.
These long planned security improvements were implemented with these goals in mind.
None of this should be a shock.
I mean, this is what California has fostered.
Meanwhile, the homeless crisis in California continues to get worse and worse and worse.
According to Mike Madrid, writing for the Sacramento Bee, Of all the disturbing societal trends that have been normalized over the past few years, it's homelessness that stands alone as the most morally outrageous and shameful.
The visible daily reminder of the collapse of one of the government's most basic responsibilities is a blight on California and the policymakers who created the problem and simultaneously demonstrate complete incompetence in addressing it.
One in four homeless people in America lives on California streets.
Remember, the population of California is about 40 million.
The population of the United States is about 330 million.
One in four homeless people in the entire country live in California.
Most of California's homeless problem is the result of policy failures in Sacramento, which is why no other state has anywhere near the problem California does, according to Mike Madrid.
says next year will mark 10 years since the elimination of the most powerful tools cities had to house low-income residents. Redevelopment allowed cities to designate areas in their community for future development opportunities and keep sales tax revenue generated by future projects. Cities could borrow against that revenue stream and set aside money for affordable housing, but it's not about the affordable housing. It's about the fact that California has decided to incentivize homelessness by saying that the police can't do anything about it. California now says that you're not allowed to move the crap that homeless people leave on the streets because it
is their crap. California has suggested it's a fundamental freedom for people to live on the streets.
And then you're surprised that homeless people are rushing in droves to California?
And how about basic taxpayer services?
Are we getting any of that in California?
So they're not handling crime.
They are not handling homelessness.
They're not handling the basic day-to-day functions of government.
But they're going to pay people to come do abortions in California.
By the way, 34,000 LAUSD students are going to not be able to attend school because of simultaneous regulatory mandates put down by the state of California.
According to KTLA yesterday, about 34,000 students have not yet complied with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in LAUSD.
There's no longer enough time for students who haven't gotten their first shot to be fully vaccinated by January 10th.
Which means that you could have tens of thousands of LAUSD students who are not even allowed to attend school.
So California is not performing basic functions.
They're just performing out the left-wing fantasies of the fantasists.
And presumably, this is the sort of policy that Democrats would like to see adopted across the nation.
After all, Gavin Newsom is a national hero to members of the left.
And people, by the way, are making that move with their feet.
They're doing what we did.
If they're in California, New York, Illinois, people are leaving.
They've decided they want no more of this.
And the left just continues along with it.
In just a second, we're going to get to the critique of conservatism put forth by David Brooks, who used to be the quote-unquote conservative at the New York Times, because I think it speaks to the conflict, the ideological conflict that is happening in the country and the complete ignorance of a certain level of elite quote-unquote conservative.
to deal with the realities on the ground of our current situation.
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Okay, so if California is governed like garbage, and if life is getting worse in places like California, and if businesses are fleeing, and if the state has decided that its top priority is not to enforce the law and protect its taxpayers, but to in fact tax the taxpayers in order for people to get abortions, then how exactly... Why do Democrats keep voting for this?
Why do people keep voting for this?
And the answer is the feeling of unearned moral superiority.
That is the answer.
Because it certainly is not the policy successes.
It's a feeling.
Life is worse in the big cities right now.
Life is worse in New York City.
They're telling you that you can't take your five-year-old to McDonald's without vaxxing your kid.
They're telling you in LAUSD you cannot send your kid to school without vaxxing your kid.
Life is getting worse in these places.
So what is the draw?
Why?
And the answer is the unearned feeling of moral superiority.
The belief that you're just better than those other guys.
There's a piece in Salon.com ...today, which really sums this up from the ex-Gribble, Amanda Marcotte.
She has a piece today titled, Young Democrats are Right, There is No Reason to Date or Befriend Trump Voters. So she's talking about a new poll from Axios.
The new poll from Axios shows that only 5% of Republicans said they wouldn't be friends with someone from the opposite party.
But 37% of Democrats say they would not be friends with a Republican.
Also, 71% of Democrats would not go on a date with someone with opposing views versus 31% of Republicans.
Now, I'll be honest with you, I think there's a big difference between being friends with somebody and dating somebody.
Because my vision of dating is that you end up marrying somebody, I really think that you should share values with somebody that you marry.
So, on a dating level, I sort of agree with the notion that you should have a baseline agreement on values.
But, I understand that's not how people actually date.
People now date for pleasure, or date for sex, or date for a variety of other reasons that don't involve marriage at the end of that chain.
But the basic finding of the survey is pretty clear, which is that Republicans are pretty tolerant of Democrats, but Democrats are absolutely intolerant of Republicans.
According to Amanda Marcotte, this is a good thing because Democrats are superior human beings.
And this is the argument you are seeing throughout American politics.
This has been going on for a long time.
I wrote a book in 2012 called Bullies, the basic premise of which was that the left liked to claim that the right was the bullying force in American public life.
But the real bullying force in American public life were people of the left who truly believe that they are morally superior to the people with whom they share a country.
And Amanda Markham makes that case quite beautifully.
She says, she says, this is about desirability, not tolerance.
Democrats are desirable as friends and lovers, not just to their fellow party members, but to Republicans as well.
You see, Democrats are so wonderful that even Republicans want to hang out with Democrats.
Republicans are so garbage that Democrats don't want to hang out with them.
Only, only stupid Republicans would want to deal with other Republicans.
So she says, Democrats are desirable as friends and lovers, not just to their fellow party members, but to Republicans as well.
But Republicans, they apparently don't have much to offer to Democrats as friends and certainly not as lovers.
Digging into the polling shows why this is.
As the Axios write-up by Neil Rothschild notes, young Democrats believe that GOP positions spearheaded by former President Trump are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation.
In particular, human rights and not just policy differences are at stake.
These would be the human rights like killing the unborn.
These would be the human rights, according to the left, like pretending that a boy is a girl and indoctrinating kids to believe that they can be members of the opposite gender.
These would be human rights, like saying that it is a good thing for people to live in their own filth on Sunset Boulevard, shooting heroin into their feet.
These are the human rights that Democrats definitely need to maintain, and if you disagree with them on policy, this means that you oppose human rights.
Amanda Marcotte says, no duh.
Just last week, the GOP-controlled Supreme Court made it clear they plan to strip basic bodily autonomy rights from everyone with a uterus.
The Republican Party is rallying around violent white supremacist rhetoric.
Relatedly, a Harvard poll from last week shows more than half of young Americans feel democracy in the country is under threat.
Over a third think they may see a second U.S.
civil war within their lifetimes.
This isn't about a dispute over marginal tax rates.
If you, quite correctly, believe that Republicans are plotting to destroy democracy, why would you want to be friends with people who support that?
And this is the case that Amanda Marcotte is, and this is the case that California Democrats are making.
As their governance gets worse and worse, the specter of the opposing party has to get worse and worse to justify that.
You have to somehow make an excuse to yourself for why you suck at your job, and your excuse is, well, the other guy is so much worse.
Those people are so much worse.
According to Amanda Marcotte, the anger on the right over this polling shows this isn't really about liberal intolerance, but an ugly sense of entitlement among conservatives.
It's fueled by a belief that they should be as obnoxious, cruel, and bigoted as they want, without having to pay any social penalty for it.
That attitude is especially troubling when it comes to dating, and is tied to long-standing sexist assumption that women owe men their time and attention, even when they don't find them attractive.
Oh, is that what it is?
Really?
Really.
So you're going to boil down Republicans pointing out that if you won't be friends with somebody from the opposing side of the aisle, this means that it's very difficult to share a polity.
You're going to boil that down to men feel a sense of entitlement from women?
She says that the bottom line here is that Republicans need to suck less.
Right?
You need to just be a Democrat and then we will deal with you.
But otherwise, quote unquote, good is what she says.
Good on young Democrats for seeing clearly what the Joe Scarboroughs of the world don't want them to see, which is that Republicans are bad people and you should never, ever treat them as fully human.
Hilariously, she then claims that Republicans don't treat people as fully human.
The entire column is about treating Republicans as not fully human, and then her complaint about Republicans is that they dehumanize people.
But this lies behind so much Democratic rhetoric these days.
It lies behind half of what Joe Biden says.
The entire Democratic agenda right now is to paint political opposition as people who oppose democracy.
How deeply rooted is this idea?
It's so deeply rooted that Joe Biden is about to have a quote-unquote democracy summit.
And at this democracy summit, there's a serious pitch for Joe Biden to tell other democracies that American democracy is on the verge of extinction.
Which is crazy.
Okay, that's insane.
If we're talking about why American democracy is on the verge of extinction, there's some pretty good systemic reasons, such as an authoritarian administrative state that is not answerable to the people, creating regulations from whole cloth that apply to tens of millions of Americans.
Like, say, maybe an OSHA VAX mandate.
And that seems like a threat to democracy.
Or maybe it's people in the federal government proclaiming that they could stack the Supreme Court.
Or that they could simply override the filibuster and do whatever they want on the pure majoritarian basis.
Right?
That's kind of a threat to democratic rights.
But that's not what Joe Biden is talking about.
According to the Democrats, the threat to democracy is the existence of Republicans.
The Republicans themselves are a threat to democracy.
And then they always point to January 6th as though January 6th was ever going to turn into a full-blown coup.
I'm sorry it wasn't, and if you believe it was, you're an idiot.
I don't know what to tell you.
January 6th was not a full-blown coup.
It was ugly.
It was despicable.
You shouldn't be storming the Capitol building in the hopes of harming the Vice President of the United States or of delaying the business of constitutional government.
You were involved in a riot and you should go to jail.
Also, if you believe that we are really on the verge of democracy ending in America on January 6th, it's because you are an idiot, or you are politically motivated, or both.
People are literally being charged right now for participating in January 6th, who are posting on Instagram saying, I don't always drink, but when I'm invading the Capitol and drinking, I drink Coors Light.
Does that sound, so it's the light beer hall pooch, as someone put it online.
Does that sound like a real coup?
But according to the Democrats, it is.
Because again, the entire thing here is that if they can't justify their own failures, they can at least pretend that their opponents are Hitler.
According to Politico, Joe Biden is now going to go in front of the world and lament the state of American democracy.
On Thursday, Biden is going to open the Summit for Democracy, says Politico.
Reduced by the pandemic to a giant two-day Zoom conference, leaders of 110 countries will make public commitments to fortify their own, in some cases rather notional, democracies.
Biden seems to have been mugged by reality.
Unlike his predecessors of whatever persuasion, this president has taken office at a moment when a democratic future in the United States can no longer be taken for granted.
Really?
Really?
And if that's the case, wouldn't it be more because the government has seized powers that are way beyond its constitutional purview?
Is anyone really afraid that they're never going to get to vote for president again?
Is anybody truly afraid they're not going to get to vote for their local rep?
What are we talking about here?
But this is the Democratic pitch.
No task seems more urgent than protection of democracy at home and abroad.
According to Politico, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, quote, And it's fundamental for the U.S.
I've heard Joe Biden have with a foreign leader.
The centerpiece of the conversation has been that he sees the fundamental struggle of our time as the face-off between autocracy and democracy.
And it's fundamental for the US to lead the effort toward the democratic resilience and reinvigoration around the world.
Biden hopes to reassert America's faith in democracy after four years in which former president Donald Trump toadyed to dictators to lead the world's democracies in the heart of struggle with autocratic states above all China for the hearts and minds of the world's citizens and to agree on strategies to fortify democracies against internal and external threats.
.
If this effort should fulfill even a part of those hopes, Biden will be remembered as the FDR-like figure whom he aspires to be.
First of all, we should note here that FDR was not the great apex of American democracy.
That dude was engaged in some behaviors like, for example, the complete imprisoning of all Japanese-American citizens.
FDR is a bad example of the nation's best Democrat, like small-D Democrat.
But this is the basic outline that has now been created by the left, is that we will be incredibly radical, and our radicalism is justified because the other side is just so evil.
So, how is the right to meet this?
Well, the right should be able to meet this with good policy.
The right should be able to meet this with good policy and with good ideas and with tried-and-true ideas.
But it seems that many on the right have bought into this rhetoric because their brains were fried by Trump.
There's no question that Trump was a reaction to the left.
American politics, just like all politics, is incredibly reactionary.
And people tend to react very strongly to things and then to sort of put aside qualms in pursuit of the reaction.
But there are some people on the right whose brains are so fried that they think that the future of democracy is indeed in the hands of Democrats.
And this is how you end up with an entire wing of the establishment Republican thinking that is dedicated to the proposition that you should be a Democrat.
This is why you will see the conservative case for California, or you'll see the conservative case for Drag Queen Story Hour, or according to David Brooks, essentially, the conservative case for voting Democrat.
We'll get to that in just one second, because it is delusional.
First, let's talk about the fact that you should, right now, if you own a home, refinance.
It's just a thing you should do.
You should do it before the rates rise.
Mortgage rates are at historic lows again.
That means you could easily drop your rate and your monthly payment.
That's not going to last forever.
The Fed is going to taper.
Mortgage rates are going to go up.
Everybody knows that next year mortgage rates are going to rise.
All you have to do right now to talk about refinancing is call American Financing, America's home for home loans.
Take advantage of a free mortgage review.
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Already coming up, we'll get to David Brooks' much-valued piece in The Atlantic about how American conservatism is dead.
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, as the Biden administration continues to try to cram down their vaccine mandates, it's more important than ever that we continue to fight it.
So far, the pushback is working.
Not only has the OSHA mandate received a nationwide stay, this week the federal court enjoined the Biden administration This is great news, but we would not be receiving that news without the continued application of pressure because the Biden administration is not backing down.
Recently, Biden announced his winter COVID plan, which sounds less like pumpkin spice latte and a lot more like mandates and more mandates and then mandates to fly and to vaccinate in order to fly and all the rest of this.
This would be a wrench in travel plans for millions of Americans.
Anthony Fauci yesterday said that That if you're having a holiday party, you should try to force all your family members to vax.
And this is all crazy.
Only pressure, only pressure is going to make them stop this.
That's why we filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for private employers.
The government does not get to make our private medical choices for us or dictate how we live our lives based on those choices.
We need your help.
If you haven't signed our petition against Joe Biden's vax mandate, I need you to head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply to add your name.
We need to send an overwhelming message to this administration.
The American people will not comply.
Our goal is to reach a million signatures.
That would provide a major boost to our legal challenge.
We have nearly 750,000 signatures so far.
We need your help to cross the finish line.
Please sign the petition at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
Share our petition with all of your friends and family.
Let's send a message so loud the Biden administration cannot ignore us.
Also, It is now a matter of utmost importance you go pick up a copy of Matt Walsh's new children's book, Johnny the Walrus.
Why?
Well, because his book not only sold out within the first 24 hours, it is now the number one LGBTQIAPZ ampersand backslash colon Hebrew bet.
Little tilde thing that goes over the N in Spanish.
Plus, bestseller on Amazon.
And yes, the book is sold out.
Don't worry, you can reserve your copy at Amazon to get your hands on the next batch shipping out soon.
Johnny the Walrus is the exhilarating, magical tale of a young boy who pretends he's a walrus.
Which is a great adventure, until the internet tells Johnny's mommy that Johnny actually is a walrus.
And she must, as a good mother, uphold his trans-walrus identity.
If you know Matt's brain, You know that the book's gonna be twisted and hysterical.
You should go buy it right now.
Head on over to Amazon, reserve your copy of Matt's timely masterpiece, Johnny the Walrus, today.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Okay, so just as I have said that the left is justifying its bad behavior by pointing to the evils of the right, there are some people on the right who will do the same, who will justify bad behavior by pointing to the evils of the left.
My view of conservatism has always been that you don't get to be non-virtuous just because the other side is being non-virtuous.
Now, you do have to protect yourself, you have to stand up for yourself, and you have to be muscular in doing all of those things, but there is a wing of the Republican Party, the establishment Republican Party, The kind of thinking man over at the New York Times editorial page, the David Brooks character, who believes that the best way to demonstrate your fealty to decency is to simply kowtow to the left because you're so embarrassed by the right.
And these are people who just never got over Trump.
It's not a shot coming from David Brooks, who once praised, I kid you not, the pleat in Barack Obama's pants.
That's a thing that David Brooks once did.
But this guy was considered the in-house conservative at the New York Times.
Now he has a piece in the Atlantic, which is definitely where you're going to want to write about American conservatism.
The same magazine that dumped Kevin Williamson for the great sin of being pro-life.
He has a piece there called, What Happened to American Conservatism?
The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression, says David Brooks.
He says, I fell in love with conservatism in my 20s.
As a politics and crime reporter in Chicago, I often found myself around public housing projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes, which had been built with the best of intentions, but had become nightmares.
The urban planners who designed those projects thought they could improve lives by replacing ramshackle old neighborhoods with a series of neatly ordered high-rises.
But, as the sociologist Richard Sennett, who lived in parts of the Cabrini Green complex as a child, noted, the planners never really consulted the residents themselves.
By the time I encountered the projects, they were national symbols of urban decay.
Back then, I thought of myself as a socialist.
Seeing the fallout from this situation prompted a shocking realization.
This is exactly what that guy I read in college had predicted.
Human society is unalterably complex, Edmund Burke argued.
If you try to re-engineer it based on the simplistic schema of your own reason, you will unintentionally cause significant harm.
Right, this is one of the fundamental bases of conservatism, is the idea that rationalism is not proof positive that you should do a thing.
That we are, human beings are uniquely capable of coming up with bad reasons to do things.
And so, wisdom of the past is a really good guide to what has worked and what has not, right?
This is the argument that Edmund Burke made in the face of the sort of floating rights of the French Revolution.
His idea was that if you try to re-engineer society ground up, you're going to fail.
Because society is really, really complex and you shouldn't screw with it too much.
This is the old G.K.
Chesterton quote about the difference between a wise conservative and a foolish liberal.
A wise conservative comes across a fence in an empty field, doesn't know why it's there, and says, I'm not going to tear that down until I know why that was there in the first place.
A liberal comes across the fence and says, I don't know why that's there.
I'm tearing it out.
And so accepting the reality of people making decisions in the past and that you have a tradition that has been handed down to you is really important.
So conservatism is very much about tradition.
Now, that tradition is also tied into human reason and it's tied into received rights.
So David Brooks talks about his version of conservatism.
He says, What passes for conservatism now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then.
Today what passes for the worldview of the right is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism.
The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.
He says, I recently went back and reread the yellowing conservatism books I've lugged around with me over the decades.
I wondered whether I'd be embarrassed or ashamed of them.
I have to tell you, I wasn't embarrassed.
I was enthralled all over again.
And I came away thinking conservatism is truer and more profound than ever, and that to be a conservative today, you have to oppose the Republican Party.
So here we go.
The conservative case for the Democratic Party, which currently is rejecting all wisdom of the past, right?
This is the soft-headedness of some of the Republican establishment.
When I say Republican establishment, I mean people, the Lincoln Project gang and the David Brookses of the world and the entire...
Literati of the bulwark, a group of people who have basically decided that they are going to side more often than not with Democrats because Democrats hold the keys to the future because they're just so angry at Republicans for going overboard on Donald Trump.
Okay, that's wild.
It's a wild perspective.
Because if you are trying to decide which party is more likely to mirror your priorities of preserving the wisdom of the past and not following rationalistic desires to destroy everything that we know to be true already in the pursuit of some sort of aimless utopia, then I don't know how in the world you can side with the Democrats.
This is a party that currently denies the reality of biological sex.
This is a party that suggests that racial essentialism is a functional feature of American life.
This is a party that believes that centralized power through government is the solution to your problems.
And people like David Brooks are saying that future lies with the Democratic Party?
For conservatives?
It's nuts.
Says David Brooks, this essay is a reclamation project.
It's an attempt to remember how modern conservatism started, what core wisdom it contains, and why that wisdom is still needed today.
He points out the history of conservatism, which springs from the Enlightenment and from the Peace of Westphalia and the end of the religious wars in Europe.
He says, One camp, which we associate with the French Enlightenment, put its faith in reason.
Some thought a decent social order can be built when primitive passions like religious zeal are marginalized and tamed, when individuals are educated to use their highest faculty, reason, to pursue enlightened self-interest, and when government organizes society using the tools of science.
Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment, of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness.
Most of the time, our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness.
They do not believe that individual reason is powerful enough to even comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down.
This is one of core conservatives' principles, epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don't know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady, but cautious and incremental.
Down the centuries, conservatives have always stood against the arrogance of those who believe they have the ability to plan history.
Hey, so I have a question.
How in the world are you saying that you need to side with the Democrats, David Brooks?
How?
Explain.
Like truly explain.
He says, Conservatism certainly has an acute awareness of sin, selfishness, greed, lust.
Conservatives also believe that in the right circumstances, people are motivated by the positive moral emotions like sympathy and benevolence.
These moral sentiments move you to be outraged by cruelty, to care for your neighbor, to feel proper affection for your imperfect country.
They motivate you to do the right thing.
Your emotions can be trusted, conservatives believe, when they are cultivated rightly.
The key phrase, of course, is cultivated rightly.
The only way to govern an unformed creature would be through a prison state if a person has not been trained by a community.
Right?
So you need a community.
So there's no state of nature.
You grow up in a community, right?
All of this is correct.
This is a correct assessment of what conservatism has typically represented.
Now, conservatism does have a place for liberty.
Conservatism is not just about accepting the wisdom of the past.
It is about bringing up people in accordance with right reason, which is a natural law term.
The idea being that you have to look at the universe, discern its rules, and then try to abide by those rules.
That way lies human happiness.
Natural right and natural law are related.
Natural law, which is the idea that human beings have the capacity to understand much of the universe, and then they can derive fundamental propositions for life from the nature of that universe.
That has an outgrowth in natural rights, which is the idea that along with those laws comes fears of liberty.
Okay, so conservatism is about all of that, because that is part of the received wisdom of the past.
But somehow, David Brooks then comes to the conclusion that the future lies with Democrats who hate you, and hate conservatism, and hate the wisdom of the past, and wish to level all of it.
So, David Brooks continues, He says, I realize that every worldview has the vices of its virtues.
Conservatives are supposed to be epistemologically modest, but in real life, this modesty can turn into British anti-intellectualism, a contempt for learning and expertise.
Conservatives are supposed to prize local community, but this orientation can turn into narrow parochialism, can produce xenophobic and racist animosity toward immigrants, a tribal hostility toward outsiders, a paranoid response when confronted with even a hint of diversity and pluralism.
Conservatives are supposed to cherish moral formation, but this can turn into rigid and self-righteous moralism.
And conservatives are supposed to revere the past, but this can turn into an abject deference to whoever holds power.
And he thinks this is what's happened to American conservatism.
He says that American conservatism is now hardening into xenophobia and brutalism.
He says that he thinks that the tension between America and conservatism is too great.
He thinks that Donald Trump is the opposite of Burkean conservatism.
He thinks that the future of conservatism lies, again, in moving away from these traditional American values.
And even from, just in order to distance himself from Trump, he's basically willing to go side with Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, seems to be the main pitch here.
He says that conservatism makes sense only when it's trying to preserve social conditions that are basically healthy.
America's racial arrangements are fundamentally unjust.
Okay, now he's speaking the language of the left.
America's race relations were fundamentally unjust in 1965.
They're not fundamentally unjust in 2021.
They're not.
Okay, but he has embraced this because it makes him feel good about himself and he gets to hang out with his liberal friends.
He says that conservatives have fallen down the rabbit hole of believing too much in free markets.
Which, of course, is incredibly silly if you've seen the Republican Party these days.
But, again, the reason that I point out this essay is to point out that there's an entire wing of... Democrats understand that the only way to justify their own agenda is to see Republicans as enemies.
And there are a bunch of people on the right who are so self-doubting and so self-loathing because so many of their friends did something they don't like in backing Donald Trump that they're willing to go along with it.
It's an amazing transformation, and it's an amazing and debilitating move.
David Brooks says that he is content to plant himself in the rightward edge of the leftward tendency in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party if its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to remote cultural stances that divide America, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is.
In 1980, the core problem of the age was statism.
In 2021, the core threat is social decay.
And he thinks that Social Decay is going to be arrested by the Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party is the party of Social Decay.
That's the party of California.
If conservatives can't see that, then fine, go side with the Democrats.
Really, we have no use for you.
If you cannot see that the party of Social Decay is the party that wants taxpayer-funded abortion magnets, Then I do not know what to tell you at this point.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon as the Matt Wall Show airs 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at Daily Wire.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
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